Homeschooling for His Glory

Our latest review items was a gem. We received a DVD from the Dive Into Your Imagination series. If you have never heard about it, I am here to tell you about it. "The Dive Into Your Imagination DVD series entertains and educates children about the amazing natural world in the oceans." " I created this Series of DVDs so kids will learn to love the ocean and grow up wanting to protect it" The series of DVDs are put together by Annie Crawley, an underwater photographer, dive instructor, speaker, and boat captain for 15 years. She also has journalism and filmmaking experience. She has a contagious love for the ocean, and the world that exists in it, and she makes it a point to share it with kids through this series of DVDs. You can learn more about her at her site Annie Crawley . The titles in the series, priced @ $19.95 each , are: Who Lives in the Sea Dive Into Diversity What Makes a Fish, a Fish  We received Who Lives in the

Yes, I think it has been a month since my last wrap-up. What have we all been up to? School: We are almost done with FLL.  We've been practicing multiplications with 3 digits, adding, subtracting, multiplying fractions, area, perimeter, and some words problems from Teachers 1800.  We've been also working our way through Christian Kids Explore Chemistry .  We are still trodding through Elemental Science Biology , we are nearing the end of the animal study started last year.  We've completed Music of the Hemispphere from Michael Clay Thompson's curriculum. It was lots of fun and lots of learning in that one. We are nearing the end of Practice Island from MCT as well. We finished unit 3 of TOG, and started unit 4. Our Tapestry weeks lately, are mainly made up of readings. We've just completed 7 weeks of Electives Outings to Niagara and The AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario) Arts: Reading: Play

As the 2011-2012 Crew year comes to a close, the TOS Crew is once again presenting awards to the vendors. This was my first year on the crew and I really enjoyed trying out the different products we were assigned. The awards are known as the TOS Homeschool Crew Blue Ribbon Awards.  Each winning vendor receives this wonderful award to display with pride. Each crew mate got to vote for their favorites in the different categories, and one winner was drawn out. Most of the winners on this list I did not get the chance to review (because of my being in Canada), but many on the crew did. You can check the reviews for each of them by clicking on their names. And now here comes the winners: Favorite Reading Instruction Product: Reading Eggs Favorite Writing Product: Write Shop Favorite Language Arts Product: Progeny Press Favorite Social Studies Product: TruthQuest History Favorite Science Product: Amazing Science Favorite Math Product: Math Mammoth Favorite Online Math P

   Here we are at day 5 of our 5 Days of Curriculum Evaluation . I hope you all had fun reading how some of our curriculum have worked for us, and also enjoyed some of the other topics over on the crew blog. Today, I will talk about our latest addition to our curriculum line up this year, for which I am very grateful. For a couple of years now I had heard about A Child's Geography, written by the author of the wonderful blog A Holy Experience, but was not able to get it until earlier this year. I was very excited when my husband brought it home from his trip to the US, back in January. I started with the boys almost right away. It has been a blessing! A Child's Geography, Explore His Earth is more than a geography curriculum. As a matter of fact it is more of a physical science book but from a geographer 's perspective. In A  Child's Geography you learn about our planet Earth as geographer taking a tour around the planet, in the atmosphere, inside the

Here we are at day 3 of the 5 days of  ... blog hop. I have been having a blast reading my other crewmates' blog posts on topics such as Traveling with Kids, Artistic Expression, Social Media, Classical Education and lots more. I hope you have enjoyed reading about my different curriculum evaluations. Today we will be tackling Tapestry of Grace . I heard about tapestry of Grace a couple of years ago. Considering myself more of a classical homeschooler, I was very attracted to Tapestry. Why? because Tapestry's philosophy of learning is classical. It follows the Trivium's stages of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. On top of that it also follows the classical 4 year cycle through History. We are now in our second year and will definitely continue on with this program up to grade 12. Tapestry of Grace is more of a unit study kind of curriculum but it is literature, living books and Great Books based as well. The core of the program rests on the reading of good l

Today, on day 3 of our 5 days of ...,  we will look at an innovative, interesting approach to Language Arts. Last year I discovered Michael Clay Thompson Language Arts Curriculum via the Well Trained Mind forum. Right away I took a liking to the approach and the material. And, of course, as a true curriculum junkie, fully happy with FLL as described in yesterday's post,  I gave this new find a try right away. I went ahead and ordered the grammar, vocabulary and poetry textbook. I have to say, I will most likely buy the next volume for next year. If you have never heard about Michael Clay Thompson's Language Arts curriculum, here is a synopsis. It is a 4 strands approach to Language Arts: Grammar: Island, Town and Voyage Vocabulary: Building Language and Cesar's English I and II Poetry : Music Hemisphere , Building Poems and a World of Poetry Writing: Sentence Island , Paragraph Town and  Essay Voyage It also contains a literature strand, which I

For day 2 and 3 of my curriculum evaluation week I will be looking at Language Arts curricula. First up is First Language Lessons . I was first introduced to FLL back in 2008 when my oldest was 5, I loved the gentle and progressive approach, and thought it would work well for him. I was right. We started that same year and did the whole book. First Language Lessons is written by Jessie Wise, co-author of the well renown book The Well-Trained Mind. The Wises believe that language is best taught progressively and gently. First Language Lessons contains lots of memorization and copywork, which the author believes is the best foundation for good writing. Over the course of volume 1 and 2 of First Language Lessons the student: Memorizes the definitions of the different parts of speech: noun, pronoun, adjective, article, verbs, adverbs, conjunction, preposition and interjections Learns about the 4 different kinds of sentences Memorizes about 11 poems Does lots of story nar